A Public Apology to Em

There are many different levels of journalistic excellence. Each one stipulatse a host of different behaviors. Some publications require careful peer review of every jot and tiddle. Others refuse to print news that would place people or countries in danger. Others require that everything printed by fact-checked. Others simply ask their writers not to blatantly fabricate facts that they'll get burned on later.

Well, FCN has no such standards, and in a recent post, we misquoted Em. Okay, we didn't just misquote her. We arbitrarily put words in her mouth. We didn't even ask her for her opinion. We didn't even give her the chance to say something we could use. We didn't take that risk. We just openly fabricated an interaction with her and posted it, knowing full well she'd probably read the post and burn us on it.

Well, guess what. She read the post and burned us on it. She totally aggravated the author of the post in question by refusing to dance with him last weekend. In the ensuing argument, she made him promise to do the following:

1) Not embarrass her again on FCN.
2) Not post a public apology the next Monday.
3) Repent.

Well, all three of those stipulations just got broken, and we just want to say publicly: Em, we're really, really sorry about putting words in your mouth and lying to you like twenty times in one weekend. Our misrepresentations and deceits rank among the most banal ever put together by media publishers. They are worse than the fabrications of Jayson Blair and make Steven Glass look like an amateur. They are right on par with Jimmy's World and Gary Hart's "go ahead and follow me." Next time will be better. Honest. Unless we forget, or unless it's a Thursday, or unless we recently had chocolate or anyone in the room is wearing green.

In addition, we publicly commit to do the following:

1) Not embarrass Em again on FCN.
2) Not post a public apology next Monday.
3) Repent.
4) Hold ourselves to the highest possible standard of journalistic excellence, including peer review and actual interviews with people.
5) Unless we forget, or unless it's a Thursday, or unless we recently had chocolate or anyone in the room is wearing green.

Please forgive us, Em. Please?

People We Actually Like

After our post a few weeks back detailing those people who are on the wrong side of our disposition, a number of comments and even a few emails have asked us to spill our guts on exactly who we do like. It's as if you guys know, deep in your heart of hearts and in places we don't talk about at parties that there is a nice streak to the FCN writers and you are desperate to dig it up. Well, from our perspective, there is nothing quite like a passel of readers jabbing us into writing something. Maybe “Faithful FCN Few” should be replaced by “Fierce FCN Fighters,” because that's what you feel like to us. It's like we're play acting: we are Paris Hilton and you all are the wardens. Or maybe we're Shamu and you are the SeaWorld trainers.

OK, fine, we'll do it. But with a bad attitude: we've got to maintain some individuality.

People we actually like: a non-exhaustive list.

Mommy G - It just wouldn't be right to start this list any other way. Mommy G is awesome. She gives us brownies. We like her. When she leaves, our colors fade to gray. Nu ma nu ma iei. Etc etc etc. Life is good.

Nancy Pelosi - What can we say? Nancy is something else. She's a real go-get-er. She stands up for what she believes in, which is a lot, among other things. She makes pants look good. She makes Zillary look bad. She's way photogenic. She doesn't need makeup. What's not to like about Nancy?

Tom Cruise - Nuff said.

Em - She reads our stuff. She emails us. She talks to us. She dances with us. She gives us girl advice. She takes care of our accessories. If FCN needs it, Em is there to supply. She's the reason FCN came back online four days early. As a side note, she asked us to never use her name again. Sorry about that, Em.

Josh Groban - All the ladies like him, so apparently we have to, too. We never actually heard his stuff, though, unless that was him singing at the end of Troy, not that we watched that movie.

Lindsay Lohan - Okay, ladies DON'T tend to like her, but that's probably just jealousy. Let's just start things off by saying that Mean Girls is one of the greatest movies ever, not that we watched that movie, either. Lindsay keeps us guessing. We can't figure her or her freckles out. She keeps us awake at night. We seriously need to have her over for an FCN interview.

The Late Saddam Hussein - This guy was so misunderstood. It's like: "You killed a bunch of innocent people, so now you're no good and we don't want to have anything to do with you." Come on, people. Lay off poor Saddam. He had feelings too, you know. In fact, he had a lot of positive qualities, like vision, decisiveness, and lots of body doubles.

Marie Antoinette, also known as Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, also known as Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and Navarre - She sat in a palace and ate rice krispies and Crepe Suzette and wore fancy clothes and had good grammar and had her people eat cake. Duuuuuude. What a woman. Kirsten Dunst definitely did NOT do her justice.

Sandy Berger - Here's a man who knows how to use his socks. Sandy's been completely maligned by the popular media for doing what any normal person would do - carry classified documents in his undergarments. We think there is more to the story and that everyone should lay off poor Sandy. If we had to choose between having a beer with Sandy and visiting the National Archives with him, we would do it.

Hillary Duff - She can sing. She can act. She can design clothes and perfume. She looks like the girl next door. She looks like a supermodel. She is now an adult. Questions? I didn't think so.

Kim Jong Il - Not every petty despot is willing to fly across the Pacific just to explain his plans for world domination in football terms. And this guy makes a great fashion statement. He clearly values performance and intimidation over appearance. One glance at those shades says: "I don't care about how I look." The opposite is actually true. That careless look takes some cultivation. Give the guy some credit.

Desperate Student - Because ... oh, forget it.

Bashar Assad - It's a bird! It's a plane! Actually, it's Bashar Assad. We can't quite figure out what he looks like. He definitely makes a great world leader, that's for sure. I mean, look at that face. It spells power. It also spells Doritos, but that's another story. Frankly, we can't figure this guy's face out, but we would definitely put a poster of it up our wall. Or maybe we wouldn't.

Jose de la Cocinar - Okay, so maybe there wasn't ever a guy named Jose de la Cocinar. This is the honorary name we've given to the dude who invented taquitoes. To the real Jose de la Cocinar, we say: we don't know who you are, but if you're still alive (which would probably be pretty freaky), we take off our sombreros to you.

This post is much too positive in tone for FCN. We're usually locked in bitter sarcasm, and here we are patting everyone on the back. To redeem the post, we'll end it on a negative note by pointing fingers at one more person we really don't like:

Santa Claus - Um. Last year? No presents? Okay, not cool. Bad Santa. Very bad Santa.

/Vacation

Well, we're back.

And four days earlier than we promised, too. We had to rush to give Em her lifeline; hey, she was dieing. It's OK. We're back now.

It's been a great vacation. Although, Em didn't like it so much. Wait, was that email off the record, too?

If you assumed by looking at the picture on our “going on vacation post” that we were visiting a touristy island with a palm tree and blue waters and recharging our batteries with all the amenities of the modern vacation, you were wrong. You know what they say about assumptions. We didn't go to Zimbabwe. That's where we thought we were going, but our flight was redirected to Belton, Texas, which is directly between Mexico and the nearest stoplight.

Actually, we drove. Cody is now officially really, really bad at following directions.

After over 4,000 miles of driving, lots of heavy breakfast on Route 66 diners and a serious case of the back seat flabs (if you don't already know, please don't ask), the FCN team is reassembled in sublime center of the sunny central valley of California.

Belton was the site of the NCFCA 2007 National Tournament. To select Belton, the league inputted the names of every city in the United States into an excel macro and randomly chose one. We showed up on the first day of the tournament wearing FCN shirts, but we got nothing but cruel remarks (and some genuinely snide remarks), so we didn't go back for the rest of the week. Our artistic souls can't handle that kind of negativity.

For those of you who didn't know from the details description above, Belton is about 40 miles from Crawford. That's right, it's right smack dab in the middle of Bush country. A casual conversation with an acquaintance brought this fact to the fore of our collective consciousness (not that we believe in the collective consciousness) and we ended up driving out to see W's digs. This is yet another example of how dangerous casual conversations can be.

As we approached Bush's house, we saw large orange traffic signs on either side of the road with imposing warnings like:

NO STOPPING

NO SLOWING

NO STARING

NO SPEEDING

NO SMOKING

NO DRIVE-BY-SHOOTING

Large cameras made no attempt to hide the fact that we were being surveyed. A drone airplane was, no doubt, overhead, and and I could barely make out the outlines of the automatic weapons hidden in the brush. As we got nearer, we saw the broken bodies of tourists who had not heeded the warnings littering the side of the road.

The actual house wasn't that impressive – it was apparently built during a down turn in the oil economy – but the helicopter hanger, communication antennae and black armored Humvees were something else. We didn't get close enough to entice anything FCN worthy, but our imagination ran wild with possibilities.

As our car was just inching its way past the driveway, the door to the house opened and Laura Bush emerged, waiving her hands for me to stop the car. We pointed sheepishly to the “keep driving” sign and remembered the swollen carcasses. We were torn between the desire to stop and see the First Lady and the desire to survive. Life is full of hard choices.

As if reading our minds, a male voice announced over the loudspeaker that the driver of the FCNMobile had “special dispensation” to disobey the rules. We decided to play along.

A uniformed security guard acted as a valet, swiftly navigating my car into the shade of the hanger. Another guard scanned us with a sci-fi device that looked like it belonged in Mission Impossible, not Texas. A third man conducted an invasive tap down search that was more painful than productive. We didn't have guns, but now, in retrospect, we don't think that he cared.

Mrs. Bush was a charming and very hospitable woman. She fixed a pot of Earl Grey while explaining that her husband was on his way home from the G8 Summit and that she regretted we wouldn't get a chance to meet him. We, in turn, struggled to maintain our end of the conversation. We tried to listen, but it seemed she wanted us to talk. It's a shame we didn't have a tape recorder, so we could relate the conversation back to you all verbatim, but alas and alack! our feeble memory will have to do...

Laura (she insisted we be on a first name basis): So I read on your blog you were coming out to my neck of the woods and I would be remiss if I didn't invite you in for some refreshments.

FCN: That's very kind of you, Laura, we were...wait, you read FCN?

Laura: Ever since Cindy Sheehan stopped jamming our Internet. You guys are some serious losers.

And we can't remember what was said after that, but the conversation lasted about a half-hour.

There are, of course, many more tales from our vacation left to be told. We spent a night on an Indian Reservation, ate at a real Mexican meal in El Peso and had a televised argument in the Texas statehouse – ok, so maybe it wasn't televised. We made a few friends and lost a couple (and by a couple, we mean quite a few, and by quite a few, I mean we would now be hiring bodyguards if they didn't come free). All in all, it was a great vacation, but boy is it good to be back. The next few posts may have some oblique references to the past few week's activity, but generally speaking, FCN is back and back to normal.

We had extensive discussions about the future of FCN, which were lubricated by quarts and quarts of lukewarm sweet tea. We discussed almost every topic conceivable, but about the only thing we could really agree on was that we need to do more of these vacation thingies.

Thanks to all of you who commented on the last post and who took the time to return to FCN today after our absence and Cody's request that you not do so. We were flattered by the high number of comments, which exceeded that of the previous 200 FCN posts put together. We hereby pat ourselves on the back, and promise that we will take your nominations into consideration as we craft our classics collection.

As a post script, our survey results revealed that most of you used the downtime from FCN to get married. Masoltov. Why weren't we invited to the reception?

It's good to be back. Look out, Daily Kos. Here we come.

People We Don't Like

FCN was emailed over the weekend by a delightful young lady who couldn't understand how three normally restrained and mild mannered students could be so mean to Cindy Sheehan. She wrote:

Who is Cindy Sheehan, and why don't you like her? (I didn't read the post; I read the title and the caution) Em.

First, Em, you gotta read the post. Sometimes the caution is a completely misleading doozy; counting on our sense of appropriateness and the warnings that make the beginning of posts is tantamount to relying on the Democrats for a tax cut. So read the post – warnings and all – and then write the hate mail.

Actually, because we are so desperate for any correspondence whatever, go ahead and email without reading the post (or any post for that matter). Just email away and we'll do our best to cut you down for it.

To answer the meat of your question, Emily, we need to explore this concept of people FCN doesn't like. Cindy Sheehan is one of many people who, while a God-made creature worthy of humane respect, we like about as much as an over-stuffed, cantankerous, smelly person who smells bad. With only a few exceptions, it's not that they're bad people, Emily, just that we don't like them.

And because this is our blog, we get to make fun of them,draw other's attention to their faults, and make stuff up about them that isn't true.

We don't like Cindy Sheehan because she abandoned an important movement and walked away before victory was achieved. She didn't fight the good fight. She dropped the flag. She's a sore loser, and the sad thing is, she didn't even have to lose. She left without saying goodbye, and we don't like that.

Sheehan is actually one of many people who can claim the dubious honor of being disliked by us. Unfortunately, measuring our tastes is a little like counting Lindsey Lohan's freckles – they keep changing – so we can't give you an exhaustive black list. We can, however, provide a brief snapshot of those names that are, currently, in the doghouse:

Al Sharpton – Because he's grating and because his hair is horrendous. Take the dead beaver back to the pet shop, Mr. Sharpton!

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga – Because he runs Daily Kos, which is stealing all our traffic and delaying FCN's internet supremacy by tens of millions of years.

Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu – Because he's mean, and he has really cool facial hair that makes us look bad.

Dillary Clinton – Because she pretends to be Nancy and because she's mean to us.

Michael Savage – Because he's scary and he doesn't like Nancy.

Hugo Chavez – Because some of us don't watch TV.

Mr. Winther – Because he didn't take our advice. He even got his daughter to do his dirty work for him. Humph.

Mitt Romney – Because we're jealous of his Presidential looks and we just don't trust him.

Katie Holmes – Because she stole this handsome stud.

Russ Solomon – Because he lied to us.

Dr Bashar al-Assad - Because he always looks as if he just swallowed a rat. Freaky. Wait, does anyone like him?

A. A. Milne - Because he created a monster ten times freakier than frankenstein.

Bill Gates - Because he's rich, and we don't like rich people. Also, he corrupted our screens for five long years. He's been working his employees to the bone for much longer.